The following story shows up on facebook/twitter/somewhere every few months or so. I do enjoy such things, but also love scouring the tubes for history and reality. Sites like snopes.com and archive.org are useful tools. Here’s the image:

A few points:

Granted 4 is not a majority of 10, but more hate Math (according to this poll) than any other subject

This is an AP (Associated Press) story that was circulated by many outlets and organizations, and it appears one created this bogus title

I’m not sure if the bogus title was intentional (as a joke), or legitimately false — but will assume the former :)

See this article (with a different title) at CNN.com here if you’re curious.

Next task: find where the copy with this title originated, and optionally the intent of said title.

The MySQL Enterprise Manager (MEM) is one of the projects I get to work on. It’s a web application for monitoring/debugging/managing MySQL .

Geeks

For the geeks amongst us, here’s a nice talk given by Mark Matthews. It demonstrates usage scenarios and information about MEM.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onoBTTprCS0

Non-Geeks

And for people who sort of know what a database is. It’s like a “Task Manager” for the MySQL database. It helps us use MySQL better, especially for debugging and tuning purposes.

Future MEM posts

It’s an exciting time to be part of the MEM team, and I expect spending larger chunks of time on the project. I’ll be writing about my MEM experiences in the future, and ideally provide useful tips and examples.

I’ve been working at Oracle for about a year now, specifically on MySQL related goodness. It’s a database, and I’m a technical writer. Essentially this means that I write words about MySQL that helps programmers write software, which mostly entails websites. I’m lucky to work with great people and am thankful for that. The documentation team is made up of myself, Jon, John, Paul, and Stefan. And we’ll be adding sixth person soon.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. I forgot about my blog but will begin writing here again. Thanks for being so patient. ;)

Today Rasmus mentioned that he received a $500 offer for the php.net domain name. Discussion ensued, which ultimately led to the indisputable belief that php.net is worth over 10 million US dollars. Therefore, let’s think about this further:

Languages by worth [1] (in USD):

php.net : $10,176,050

python.org : $4,088,792

perl.org : $246,064

ruby-lang.org : $219,624

Clearly PHP is #1. And PHP should sell this domain name and purchase the competitors, so here’s how that proposal works:

First, purchase the competitor domain names:

10,176,050 – (4,088,792 + 246,064 + 219,624) = 5,621,570

Next, purchase php.org for future use:

5,621,570 – 2,594 = 5,618,976

And lastly, distribute the remaining cash to the php.net account holders

5,618,976 / 1,568 = $3,583.53 checks for everyone

So if you want to be a part of this action, then be sure to apply for a SVN account within the next week. Here’s one way to do that:

Receive a php.net account (and your very own @php.net (soon to be @php.org!) email address) and start committing

And now wait for a large fat sack of cash in the mail, in the form of a check (signed by Rasmus, our BDFL)

How have we not done this already?!

And PHP is determining how best to take advantage of the haystack/needle confusion, but the increased site traffic from confused users can and should be taken advantage of. See, this was part of the master plan all along!